About US: Mission Statement
The mission of the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance is to protect and restore biological biversity, habitat for wildlife and fish, rare plants, and roadless lands in Wyoming and surrounding states. We started doing conservation work in 1988 to preserve the natural character of the Medicine Bow National Forest in southeastern Wyoming. Although we continue to fill this niche today, by the early 1990's our work had expanded far beyond the 'Bow, with increasing attention to wildlife issues.
In 1994 we legally incorporated as Biodiversity Associates, but we have recently changed our name to Biodiversity Conservation Alliance to better reflect our strong advocacy work and the growing nature of our organization. We are a lean, efficient non-profit organization with a current full time staff of five.
BCA Staff and Board of Directors, from left to right: Bob Strayer, Jeremy Nichols, Erik Molvar, Suzanne Lewis, Jeff Kessler, Maggie Schafer, Perry Wechsler, Sarah Egolf and Mark Jenkins.
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We concentrate our efforts on the forests, prairies, and rivers of Wyoming, western South Dakota, and northern Colorado. Our focus is on entire ecosystems and on individual species, particularly those which are in need of immediate conservation help but lack a constituency and do not have a high public profile.
The Biodiversity Conservation Alliances'guiding principle is that all species and ecosystems deserve protection. For example, numerous groups are working to gain protection for the Yellowstone ecosystem and charismatic species such as the Grizzly Bear, but few are advocating for protection of the Desert Yellowhead (a rare plant known to exist in only one small area in central Wyoming), Vertigo snails in the Black Hills, or the Bluehead Sucker in the Little Snake River. Biodiversity Conservation Alliance along with other conservation groups, continues to work at its original mission of protecting the Medicine Bow ecosystem and its critical forested links to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
We use outreach and education to foster public support for biodiversity and wild areas. And we use science and the law to hold public managers and decision-makers accountable for protecting the nation's heritage and upholding the public trust. Our three primary strategies to gain increased protection protection for wild species and their habitats are:
- educating the public and decision makers (like the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management) about the importance of conserving biological diversity and wild lands,
- advocating directly through citizen alerts, written comments, meetings, technical analyses, etc., for the conservation of wildlife and sensitive habitats, and concurrently advocating for less damaging alternatives to ill-conceived development proposals, and
- opposing by lawsuit and administrative protest developments that threaten rare species or sensitive ecosystems.
Of course, to do these things, it is necessary to first determine where sensitive species and sensitive habitats exist, so an important part of our work is dedicated to this task as well. This component involves field work, literature searches, interviews with scientists, and analysis using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and computer mapping. We also provide technical assistance on legal issues, conservation science, and GIS to a number of citizen groups.
Although we work collaboratively with a large number of other conservation groups, The Biodiversity Conservation Alliance is not affiliated with any other local, regional, or national organizations.
